Thursday 14 November 2013

Smart mice

Once you have mice, you kinda always get mice. We've had mice in the past, and tried to get rid of them.

First we tried trusty old basic mouse traps. The mice successfully stole the food without ever setting off the traps. No matter what we did, the food was always taken, the trap never sprung.

Then we tried new fangled plastic snap traps. Guaranteed to be sensitive, the mice got the bait time and time and time again without ever setting them off.

Then we switched to glue traps. We caught maybe one or two mice over the span of many, many months. The cat caught more mice than we did. I probably have a photo somewhere of Jello bringing us mice at 2 AM and playing with them in the bedroom.

So we finally switched to poison mouse bait. This seemed to work last year; we put it out, some got eaten, then they stopped eating it. When we pulled our walls apart to fix the flood damage this summer, we found dried up dead mice in the walls.

I don't know what started me putting the mouse bait back out this fall, but I did, and some of it started to get eaten. I figured the mice were moving back in with the onset of cold weather. The first bait I was putting out in September was like sesame seeds, but we ran out, so I bought more. This new stuff looked like little green rabbit pellet food. I put that out, and it disappeared. Fast. The more I put out, the more that disappeared. I thought this interesting, because it's suppose to kill in 24 hrs.

When we went to Maui, I asked our house sitters to monitor the bait stations. They did; and refilled them a LOT. Every few days they were adding bait. They put out almost half a kilo of bait in a month.

Today, I was prepping to ski tomorrow. Pulled my ski boots out of the basement -- and found them full of uneaten mouse bait.
That bagfull of bait came out of one boot
Not just the green stuff; no, there was tons of uneaten seed bait, too. There was almost 350 g of mouse bait in my one boot.

Then Karen mentioned that one of the cardboard boxes awaiting recycling in the basement had mouse bait in it.
How on earth do they get in and out?
I think its time to call a professional. Seems these mice are just too smart for me.

3 comments:

Ron said...

It sounds like Jello is letting you down.

Wally said...

FORCEFULLY jamming peanut fragments WITHIN the loop on the bait pedal of a conventional wooden Woodstream mouse trap and coating the peanut with firm peanut butter may entice Mickey and Minnie to be more aggressive in their approach & get you folks the desired results. Bad karma but fewer mice.

RyderDA said...

Wally, I started with plastic bait pedal ones, and nothing would jam in. I switched to the metal bait pedal ones and tried that technique. I tried wrapping it with dental flood & spearing it with peanut butter. I tried trying down various types of food. Never caught a single mouse, but in every case, they got the bait. They even chewed off the dental floss and took it away.